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Tag Archives: Chris Lombardi

Notice: I am neither dead nor AWOL. Just busier than ever, with a suddenly-really-pending deadline, new blogging at Guernica, and reporting for Newsworks.org – the web portal of WHYY, my local PBS/NPR station.

Here is the very first story I ever pitched to WHYY’s Alan Tu, back in September, Given my background in sussing out tenant stories in Manhattan, I knew quickly that there had to be a story in our slice of the national foreclosure crisis. It’s a story about predatory lending, about neighborhoods, and about a pioneering legislator who figured out 30 years ago what to do about all this.

The story’s also a phoenix: it sat in the pending pile, right behind breaking news, until the city suspended all foreclosures AND I happened upon the perfect interview subject. I hope it absorbs and amuses some folks.

Now to my follow-up story, and to cutting my book manuscript by two-thirds.

Last week’s Congressional votes have opened the door for both houses of Congress to finally take up the bill developed by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. The next two weeks will be spent, the New York Times‘ Carl Hulse observed, with both parties competing to amend the bill.

As our own Diane Vacca observed last fall, the late-2008 crash alerted all of us to the fact that the dissolution of the post-Great Depression controls on banking had some very serious downsides. Among them, perhaps, was the discrediting of the very ratings agencies investors have traditionally depended on (such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s), something DeutscheBank’s Karen Weaver foreshadowed in an interview with us six months before the Big Bust. So who can we depend on to keep our money safe, short of putting it all in gold bars under the bed?

To one extent or another, all the legislators working on the Wall Street reform bill are trying to answer that question.

But what’s in the bill that was filed, and what has been voted on so far? Like the problem it’s trying to address, it’s long and complex. Below is a sampling of how the bill tries to address some of the more obvious fault lines–the systemic problems identified by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission–drawn from the committee’s own summaries.

Stopping the casino: “Wall Street should have a socially important purpose, and not resemble a casino, where people are more concerned with valuing an option than valuing a business,” investment guru Warren Buffett said recently. The Senate bill incorporatesthe ‘Volcker Rule,’ suggested by former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, which requires regulators to implement regulations for banks, their affiliates and holding companies, to prohibit proprietary trading, investment in and sponsorship of hedge funds and private equity funds, and to limit relationships with hedge funds and private equity funds. Nonbank financial institutions supervised by the Fed will also have restrictions on proprietary trading and hedge fund and private equity investments.

Reining in derivatives: Perhaps the knottiest of the issues the Senate is wrestling with is that of all the new financial instruments, fabricated from mathematical sleight-of-hand and other people’s money.

According to a report from the Congressional Research Service, for a while these instruments seemed like the best game in town: “Since 2000, growth in derivatives markets has been explosive (although the financial crisis has caused some retrenchment since 2008). Between 2000 and the end of 2008, the volume of derivatives contracts traded on exchanges, such as futures exchanges, and the notional value of total contracts traded in the over-the-counter (OTC) market3 grew by 475 and 522 percent respectively. By contrast, during nearly unprecedented credit and housing booms, the respective value of corporate bonds and home mortgages outstanding grew by 95 and 115 percent over the same period.” Then came the crash; a few weeks ago we posted footage of former regulator Brooksley Born exposing the damage. Arkansas senator Blanche Lincoln (right) has given the issue particular heat, and authored the derivatives section of this bill.

Of course, many sensible investors already spurned derivatives when they had the choice. Take, for example, Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway holding company: hedge fund manager Alan Schram, reporting on a shareholders meeting of the company, noted that Berkshire holds “250 derivative contracts, down from some 23,000 contracts ten years ago, with a notional value of 1 percent of that of some other large institutions.” But many of America’s pension funds and 401(k)s were not quite so farsighted.

Derivatives “have some utility but have to be conducted safely, under responsible rules,” Buffett told shareholders. So what sort of “responsible rules” does the Senate bill currently propose? For starters, it would “require issuers to disclose more information about the underlying assets and to analyze the quality of the underlying assets” of derivatives and, perhaps more importantly, “require that companies that sell products like mortgage-backed securities to retain at least five percent of the credit risk, “unless the underlying loans meet standards that reduce riskiness.” It would also change the rules and the composition of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, to stop outside “investment managers” from placing bets with the taxpayer funds and pension contributions.

More systemically, it brings “an estimated 90 percent of the market for derivatives, which are essentially bets on the future price of something, onto a regulated trading exchange—similar to a stock exchange, where price and volume data are publicly available to potential investors,” Brooksley Born’s former aide Michael Greenburger told ProPublica’s Marian Wang. “It leaves certain exceptions for foreign exchange deals and commercial use (such as an airline company’s use of derivatives to hedge against prices of fuel skyrocketing).” Let’s watch as senators parry over those exceptions, and see whether what they agree on is enough.

Leverage requirements. The word “leverage” may make you think of a grizzled Timothy Hutton on a Fox TV show. But for banks and shadow bankers, it means how much in the way of assets has to stand behind your investment, whether in cash, real estate, or farm implements. “If you’re a bank, the upside of leverage is that it gives you a lot of money that you can use, well, to make more money,” writes Washington Post wonk Ezra Klein. “It’s the difference between investing $1 in the stock market and $40. The downside is that it makes your firm fragile.”

If your leverage is at 2:1 — that is to say, you’ve borrowed one dollar to add to the dollar you already had — you could lose a full dollar and still be able to pay your creditor back. If you’re at 10:1, anything beyond a 10 percent decline in your assets means that if your creditors want repayment, you can’t pay them back (as you’ve lost more than your original dollar). At 20:1, a 5 percent decline will put you underwater. At 40:1, a mere 2.5 percent decline can finish you off. The more leverage you have, the less bad luck you can survive.

Therefore, the Senate bill would create a Financial Oversight Regulatory Commission, which would “impos[e] tough new capital and leverage requirements that make it undesirable to get too big” and therefore “too big to fail.” C-SPAN addicts, here are your marching orders: keep track of how this aspect of the bill changes in upcoming weeks.

Preventing future runs on the “shadow banking” system: What happened in September 2008, when all credit froze, did not include hordes of depositors rushing to pull their money out of Chase or Bank of America branches. Those institutions are covered, and regulated, by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). What did happen was an immediate blowout in the complex, interwoven, and immensely profitable network of financial institutions operating outside federal supervision, which magnified the collapse of one sector (subprime mortgages) until it nearly broke the economy.

Chief among these, perhaps, are hedge funds and reinsurance companies (think AIG). The Dodd bill establishes an Office of National Insurance to better monitor the latter, and would require a hedge fund with significant assets to register with the SEC like any other broker. Hedge funds, according to the bill summary, would have to “provide information about their trades and portfolios necessary to assess systemic risk. This data will be shared with the systemic risk regulator and the SEC will report to Congress annually on how it uses this data to protect investors and market integrity.

As even the most casual observer of last week’s Senate hearings on Goldman Sachs might have noticed, it’s a long and complicated way back to the stability investors once expected. “It took twenty-five years of misguided economic theorizing and legislation, along with insufficient regulation, to create an outlaw financial sector,” wrote economist John Cassidy for The New Yorker. “Rehabilitating it will be a mighty, multiyear endeavor.” So, it seems from today’s news, will even trying to talk about it.

Coming soon: our report on the controversial bailout-or-no-bailout provisions, the current state of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, and how the Senate plans to deal with those suddenly rascally ratings agencies.

I’m glad you went on “Oprah” this week. Ever since you burst onto the national consciousness in 2008, I’ve been wondering about you — the former Lisa Druck, now a Southern Californian named Rielle, and since last year the mother of a lovely toddler who looks just like former senator and presidential contender John Edwards.

Back then, I had a pretty good idea of who you were, and, paradoxically, none at all. Here on the WVFC website, I wrote about what your story brought to mind: “We Could All Be Elizabeth Edwards.” Like many women, I first heard the unfolding tale with that brilliant attorney and cancer survivor in mind, and felt sick. “We all could be Elizabeth: we all could see something we’ve fought for splintered in a second, because of others’ stupidity or our own. As midlife women, we curse what our bodies can no longer do or be or look like…” Or the fear that crosses the heart that someone newer and shinier can walk into your relationship and upend it.

It’s been nearly two years. For a while you were easier to ignore, what with the tawdry details spilling out of all the political press or the memoir of former Edwards aide Andrew Young, who once claimed to be your child’s father. As soon as Elizabeth finally filed for divorce, protecting her children, it was easy to decide you were none of my business.

So why turn to that hour with Oprah and your Hollywood-lovely face? Maybe because as much as I think I could have been Elizabeth, I also know I could have turned out more like you.

After all, you and I moved to California for love in 1991, though I went to San Francisco and you took up life in Beverly Hills with a new husband and a new name. I’ve also had the very experience you described to Oprah, about the day in 2006 when you met Edwards: for me it was an evening on a dance floor when “love at first sight” didn’t feel like a cliche and it seemed fine to ignore common sense. (Thank heavens, in my case the dude involved melted away after a few weeks.) “Our hearts were louder than the minds,” you said. Right. Anyway there’s a chemical name for that “wave of energy” you felt: oxytocin, the hormone that helps babies nurse and makes people newly in love forget to wash their hair.

Not that there was anything wrong with your hair today. You looked like a starlet, with the same flat smile. But the way you talked reminds me of some people I knew out West, who regarded appointments as fiction, jobs as encumbrances, and promises as suggestions. Like the guy who enticed a dear friend of mine to sell everything and move to San Jose so they could start a business together — then announced that he had a bad breakup and a twisted ankle and “wasn’t in a space to work right now.” Your jargon reminds me of the self-help pseudo-spiritual cults everywhere out there, whose members kept inviting me into “informational sessions” so I could learn about things like “the reality-tone scale.”

Some of these people were friends of mine, dance partners, lovers. Like you, they saw “seeking the truth” not as a task but a treat: “I was supporting him in his process, and his intentions never wavered. I knew that he wanted — he just had a really unique way of getting there — to live a life of truth,” you said of Edwards, with that blissed-out smile.

And this is the point where I realize: Nah, I don’t have to worry about turning into you. I’ve broken up with you. Several times.

So has Jenny Sanford, former first lady of South Carolina, who was on “The View” the day you appeared on “Oprah.” Her comment about your declaration that “I’m not a home wrecker,” was a sad laugh with a flash of anger: Commenting on you and her ex-husband’s Argentinian mistress, she said, “They weren’t 18 years old. They knew exactly what they were doing.” The other women at “The View” agreed, uniting for once before the incomprehensible.

But I don’t think what any of us say is going to make a difference. You believe that your profound spiritual connection to John Edwards is something no one else can understand. This can’t really be a letter to you, not even one of those open letters we write to politicians. Because you’ve evolved to a place where your ears cannot hear what we’re saying.

You and John Edwards — who I’m embarrassed to admit I once voted for — have been reminding me of that line from The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” In your case, those ‘other people’ include Elizabeth; your baby daughter, Frances Quinn; and Cate, Jack and Emma Claire Edwards, now set to grow up a bike-ride away from you and the baby.

For a while, the clean-up crew included the rest of America. Knowing that, you went on “Oprah” to overcome the “false picture” that all those years of press reports had brought. But I think you did the opposite. “It was compelling TV, but in the end, Hunter didn’t seem any more understandable than when The National Enquirer first discovered her,” said TIME Magazine. Salon writer Rebecca Traister wrote: “While I understand love and desire to be viciously complicated things, and certainly do not believe all mistresses to be craven, self-absorbed or ill-intentioned, I believe Rielle Hunter to be all of those things.” And you know you’re in trouble when the New York Times‘ TV reporter compares your unblinking certainty to that of Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Your destructive capacity is narrower now than in 2006, but it’s still hard to watch.

Thank you, Rielle Jaya James Druck, for reminding us of who’s behind those wide eyes.

It’s now been nearly a week since I–and oh, about 300,000 others–became early adopters of Apple’s new tablet computer, the somewhat unfortunately named iPad. (I still wonder if any women were in the room when they decided on the name.)

More centrally: why did I, a freelance writer and editor with a super-limited budget, line up at the Apple Store on Saturday with all the hardcore Mac fanboys — who had, like me, “pre-ordered” the device?

Partly because the minute I heard about it, it felt to me not like a luxury item but a near-necessity.

Full disclosure: I’ve been a charter member of the Mac cult for just about 20 years, and am fully aware that it means I have spent more for computers than I should have. I am also one of those “laptop people,” not having used a desktop computer since about 1995. Limits on my vision , dexterity and agility–first from illness, then from age as well–have kept me keenly interested in tools that let me focus on my work and not the computer’s. And as a media professional, I’ve been keenly aware of the newer media spaces, not just “Internet-instead of newspapers,” but phones, game consoles, and social media.

When the iPhone came out, I was in the market for a new laptop and thought of buying the iPhone instead, since it’s a powerful computer in its own right. That fancy passed, but as prices came down I became a proud owner of an iPod Touch, and learned to love both its easy access to work (email, editing blog posts like this one) and its quick windows to the rest of the ‘net. (I swear, for example, that I read a lot more of the New York Times on that tiny screen than I ever did in print.)

The problem with the Touch? Remember the vision and dexterity problems I mentioned above? Even when I increase font sizes, it has felt severely limiting—especially given the admittedly beguiling multitouch interface, where you physically turn pages and place Scrabble tiles. I joke about it, have called it all occupational therapy. But when I first started hearing about the iPad, and heard it critiqued as “just a big iPod Touch,” I clapped my hands. You made me a big one?

And when I learned about the keyboard dock that could make typing on the thing a bit easier, I knew it might even be my next laptop. Sort of.

When I got in line at my local Apple Store last Saturday, I was completely convinced the line would be full of women like me, whose eyes are beginning to go and whose multitasking lives demanded a tool both pleasurable and with fewer demands on the body.

Of course, I was wrong: it seemed, at least at first glance, that only men between 25 and 40 were really itching to get their hands on the newest Apple media device. (Or else–and this was perhaps more likely–women like me were far too busy to deal with that wait-in-line thing and just ordered it for delivery.)

And yes, so far it’s a mixed blessing. Though still a quarter the weight of my MacBook, the thing is far heavier than you expect, being crammed with software and a honking huge battery. Programs whisper and quit on occasion. And that keyboard dock isn’t ready yet, limiting the amount of time I actually write on it (though I wrote about half of this post that way). But I’m already loving the reading tools (hello, Moby Dick and countless academic articles for the book I’m writing). And the rather excellent speakers mean that while I’m doing more major writing at home, I have a very good soundtrack. (It’s a book! No, it’s a newspaper! No, it’s a…..boom box?)

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes. It’s way too early to know if I’ll end up regretting my decision to buy it so soon. I’ll check in as the year proceeds, as newer and even cooler and much cheaper products come out from Apple and its rivals.

In the meantime, I’m becoming a decent Scrabble player. And maybe I can get Stephen Colbert to give me his recipe for iPad salsa.

When Rebecca Skloot walked into the Kimmel Cancer Center in Philadelphia last week to talk about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, she was riding a wave of positive reviews for the book she had been working on for nearly half her life. The Boston Globe had called it “a well-written, carefully researched, complex saga of medical research, bioethics, and race in America.” Salon termed it “a heroic work of cultural and medical journalism,” and the New York Times thought it “a thorny and provocative book about cancer, racism, scientific ethics and crippling poverty [that] floods over you like a narrative dam break.”

At the Kimmel Cancer Center (part of Thomas Jefferson University), the crowd was made up of scientists and physicians, many of whom knew Henrietta Lacks only as HeLa, for the cell line named after her unusual, fast-growing cells. Over the years, HeLa cells have been used for cancer research, to test the polio vaccine, unlock the secrets of DNA transcription, and thousands of other medical projects.

Among the crowd was Dr. Leonard Freedman, dean of research at Thomas Jefferson, whose lab invented a new tool for DNA research using HeLa. “You know, I used to do a lot of science with these cell lines,” Freedman said to this reporter just before the lecture. But the book was a revelation: “We knew the cells came from some woman, but we even had her name wrong. And we certainly didn’t know any of what’s in the book.”

Dr. Edith P. Mitchell.

The same was true for Dr. Edith P. Mitchell, a clinical professor of medicine and program leader in the school’s Gastrointestinal Oncology program (and a general with the Missouri National Guard. “My first exposure to HeLa cells occurred when I was a young student, and was told not to contaminate anything,” Mitchell explained, “because, and I quote, ‘Those HeLa cells will grow all over the place.’”

All of this, Mitchell added, made her eager to secure Skloot as the center’s lecturer for Black History Month. Some might find this a paradoxical choice, seeing Henrietta Lacks’s story as a prime example of the medical community’s injustices to African-Americans. (For more on this history, see Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington, who helped advise Skloot on her book.) Mitchell had a different view: “What does all this have to do with Black History Month?” she asked the crowd. “I say it’s connected to our history—by which I mean,” she said, glancing pointedly at the mostly white faces, “the history of the human race.”

Skloot asked the audience of 200: “How many people in the room knew about Helen Lane, before today?” About 100 hands went up. “And how many have worked with HeLa cells?” Two dozen raised their hands.

Then Skloot began to trace the story of a young mother of five who came to a clinic at Johns Hopkins, in 1951 “the only hospital in Baltimore that would see black patients,” after discovering a lump on her cervix.

Back then, “informed consent” laws didn’t exist, she added. The only consent needed was the patient’s signature on a form granting Johns Hopkins permission “to perform any operative procedures that they may deem necessary in the surgical treatment of Henrietta Lacks.”

It was immediately clear that Lacks had a full-blown tumor. She was given the prescribed treatment of the time, a course of radiation. But her diagnostic lab sample soon took on a life of its own.

That specimen, Skloot explained, was sent somewhere having nothing to do with treatment: to cell biologist George Gey, inventor of the “roller drum” used in labs worldwide, who was in the process of gathering all the cervical-cancer cells he could find.

“Gey thought he could isolate cells that had characteristics that were only cancer,” said Skloot. “So he collected them, but until he got Henrietta’s, the cells just always died. Hers didn’t.”

In fact, they doubled every four hours. The manically reproducing cells behaved the same way in Lacks’s body: she died eight months after entering the clinic. But her cells now had their own rooms at Johns Hopkins, and Gey was beginning to publish the fact that he’d found and perfected the line he called HeLa. Soon every scientist wanted his own supply, and eventually facilities were built to mass-produce HeLa cells and ship them around the world.

“I first heard about the HeLa cells when I was 16, at community college taking a class for high school credit,” said Skloot. “My teacher said what all teachers said in those days: ‘There are these cells, there was this woman, her name was Henrietta Lacks, and she was black.’ And I was like, That’s it? That’s all we know? He told me to go find out some more and write an extra-credit paper about it,” she laughed. “About a year ago I sent him my manuscript for this book: ‘Hi, remember that paper I owe you?’”

It took Skloot nearly two years to gain the confidence of Henrietta’s daughter Deborah Lacks- Pullum, whose journey to understanding is the core of Skloot’s book.

“I was just the next in a line of white people who wanted something,” Skloot said, adding that she gained Lacks-Pullum’s trust only after she offered to include her on the quest, taking her on lab visits and field research. During the years that HeLa had become increasingly renowned—the first cells to go into space, the first whose genes were mapped—the family, back in Baltimore and Virginia, had been largely unaware that Henrietta’s cells had even survived.

Asked what the family thought of her book, Skloot said that “there was a lot of pain associated with the story to them, and there were certain parts they avoided—like accounts of her death. But I think it was also sort of cathartic.” Deborah Lacks-Pullum remained deeply traumatized for many years. After learning about the HeLa cells and the research it had facilitated, said Skloot, “she believed her mother’s soul was in these cells. She wondered, ‘How can my mother rest in peace, if you’re shooting her cells to the moon?’”

Graphic from WIRED Magazine shows the global reach of the HeLa cells.

Other members of the family were, and are, passionately angry. “Her brothers became very angry when they knew the cells were being bought and sold,” said Skloot. She pointed out that any researcher in the hall that day could go online and buy a vial of HeLa for about $250, with other HeLa-derived products costing up to $10,000. Meanwhile, many members of the Lacks family are without health insurance. “They keep saying, ‘If our mother is so important, why can’t I get access to health care?’”

Skloot cautioned that the facts don’t support the media hype that something illegal has been done. Over the decades, she said, stories about the Lackses ran like much of the negative coverage of her book: Woman’s cells stolen, millions made, family still poor. But there’s no evidence of actual theft in a country where consent laws were hazy, she said—only a built-in structural injustice toward people without power.

“George Gey has been held up for decades as this guy who stole her cells, maybe didn’t treat her right,” said Skloot. On the other hand, some scientists have objected to the fact that the book raises ethical issues at all. “One stood up and told me it was irresponsible to tell the story, that this is going to give people the idea that they own their cells.” But Skloot refuses to see the story in cut-and-dried terms. “This has been held up as another Tuskegee,” she said, referring to the notorious forty-year syphilis study that used sharecroppers as its subjects, “and it’s just not.”

According to Skloot, even Lacks’s grandchildren don’t think so. Most of them are in their thirties, she said, “the first generation to have much schooling—one granddaughter is finishing up a masters’ in psychology. And they look at this whole thing from a very different perspective from their parents, saying things like ‘You can’t judge the 1950s from the ethics of today.’ They’re very proud to have come from her.” When the family came up to New York for a book-signing like this one, she said, “the room sort of erupted in cheers. All the scientists were saying to them, ‘This is what I did with the cells, this is what’s important,’ and asking them for autographs.”

With Roland Pattillo of Morehouse College, Skloot has set up the Henrietta Lacks Foundation to benefit the Lacks family. She spoke of one scientist who pledged to donate to the foundation: “‘A dollar every time I process a batch of these cells,’ he said. So I got a dollar and a dollar, and then he realized, ‘Whoa, this is going to add up!’”

Another potential source of compensation for the Lackses is a movie or TV adaptation, which would require producers to purchase not only rights from Skloot but ‘life rights’ from the family. The book has already sparked quite a bit of interest from studios, she said. Like Henrietta Lacks’s immortal cells, her story—complex, controversial, and needing to be told—is likely to be with us for some time to come.

This week’s arrest of Roman Polanski felt weirdly unsurprising. It fit somehow with all the flashbacks to 1969 the media’s treated us to this year — as that TIME cover put it, “From the Moon to Charles Manson.” What will the 1970’s reminiscences be like, one wondered? Maybe like this.

But who really remembers 1977? And what does anyone really remember about Polanski’s arrest?

I actually remember that time pretty vividly. I was fifteen years old, and in some circles at my high school, relationships with older men were all the rage. They meant we were cool, outre, too daring for dating. (Not for me, mind you, though I still hoped to grow into it.) When the tabloids shrieked about Polanski’s statutory-rape conviction, I even blithely wrote an op-ed in my high school journalism class about how such “relationships” shouldn’t be illegal, even if the girl in question was 13 years old.

Of course, like most opinion writers then and now, I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. I certainly didn’t know that the girl had told a grand jury that she was given Quaaludes and then raped, that she’d said no and asked to go home, that Polanski pled guilty to a lesser charge and then fled before final sentencing.

My main excuse now for my blitheness then is that I was fifteen, and that it didn’t last long. I’ve never been able to see a Polanski film. and cringed every time he won another award. Knowing the traumatic facts of his life, from the Holocaust to the Manson murders, plays differently with me: it can explain, perhaps, but it’s the opposite of an excuse.

This week, I was floored as news reports kept saying that Polanski had been arrested “for sex with an underage girl,” without explaining what had happened; at the sudden movement to “Free Polanski,” giving the perp what Slate’s Elizabeth Wurtzel calls “a genius exception for rape.” Even Whoopi Goldberg made my old mistake: “Things are different in Europe,” she said, and besides “It’s not rape-rape.”

I have no doubt that Goldberg has since been shown the grand jury testimony, but what’s her excuse for talking before she’d done the research? It’s on TheSmokingGun.com, for godsake.

As Woody Allen said many years ago:”How wrong Emily Dickinson was. Hope is not the thing with feathers. The thing with feathers is my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.” What hope has is claws.

I’m superstitious enough not to say much more. I was gonna use a Back to the Future clip, but the one above summarizes how we feel about it. More after June 1, when I’ll no longer worry that it was all about as real as that TV show I keep referring to.